SAN MARCOS: Settlement reached in Eveland suit

The superintendent of the San Marcos Unified School District said Friday that district officials have agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the family of Scott Eveland, who was a high school senior when he collapsed with a traumatic brain injury during a school football game in September 2007.

Superintendent Kevin Holt said he could not disclose the amount of the settlement until after a hearing next Friday for a judge to approve the agreement. He also said the district and Eveland's family plan to issue a joint statement at that time.

Eveland's family sued the school district and others after Eveland staggered off the football field early in the second quarter during a game at Mission Hills High School and collapsed on the sidelines on Sept. 14, 2007. Before the game was over, Eveland lay on an operating table, his skull cap removed as doctors battled to save his life.

Early on, the focus of the lawsuit had been centered more on the 15 or so minutes after his collapse that it took to get Eveland in an ambulance and headed to the hospital.

But the focus seemed to change after a student trainer came forward in 2010 and said she had overheard Eveland ask one of the trainers if he could sit out the first quarter of the game because he was having headaches and "couldn't see the football well enough," according to court filings.

The former student trainer, Brianna Bingen, also said she heard the trainer, Scott Gommel, bring it up to head coach Chris Hauser, but said she heard Hauser yell that "Scotty was his (expletive) football player and if he wanted to put Scotty in the game he was going to damn well put him in the game."

In a ruling last year, Superior Court Judge Thomas Nugent denied the school district's bid to dismiss the case, finding that it was for a jury to decide "whether the district's employees had notice of the plaintiff's headaches and kept him in the game regardless of those headaches."

Bingen's account of what she said she overheard on the sidelines comes in contrast to statements from school officials who said none of them were aware that Eveland might have been suffering medical problems when he stepped on to the field that night.